In the paper “Sensitivity of distributions of climate system properties to the surface temperature data set” by A. G. Libardoni and C. E. Forest (Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L22705, doi:10.1029/2011GL049431), two errors were made. First, there was an offset of 1 month when comparing model data to observational data. Second, the likelihood function that was used to relate model goodness-of-fit statistics to a probability distribution, while derived from basic understanding of probability distributions, is not acceptable as a likelihood function to statisticians.